I staff Sabakon in Las Vegas and we, for the most part, make our own badges. Our badges were laminated all around and looked very cool:

We printed the badges via Uprinting.com, which has great prices and an excellent product. For special badges, like "volunteers" and "staff" where we didn't need so many, we printed those at a local printer and cut them ourselves. We bought our laminating pouches at laminator.com and laminated the badges ourselves. It did take some time, and we did have 2-3 staff members working on them for about a week or two, however the money we saved by doing it ourselves was definitely worth it. Our attendees, exhibitors, and guests were also very impressed with the badge quality. For our convention, we made approximately 600 badges (Day-of registrations got wristbands, not badges), and the material cost for those badges was about $150 total.